[vlc] PVR250 + 802.11g + VLC

[Philip Edelbrock]

Last week I took a chance at buying an 'OEM' Hauppage PVR250 from eBay
(there are a couple vendors selling them at a 'buy it now' price of about
$89+s/h, if you are interested). I popped it into my Linux box, updated my
kernel, got ivtv, and managed to stream 8Mb live TV to my laptop via
802.11g (airport extreme, actually).

Very cool!  A couple quick notes for those who might want to try it:

- Make sure your kernel has NO bt848 support built in.  Some of the
drivers in ivtv are tweaked versions of the bt848 drivers.  So, make sure
you don't conflict with the stock kernel v4l drivers. 

- I had troubles getting the pvr module in vlc to work well.  Not to
mention that it isn't included in the binary provided (you have to built
it yourself).  But, this works just fine:

cat /dev/video0 | vlc --sout rtp://192.168.1.1

Loading on the server is almost nothing while streaming.  Use test_ioctl
(in ivtv) to tweak the settings. I found 720x480 NTSC with a bitrate of
8,000,000 worked fine. 

It's also handy that /dev/video0 simply outputs an mpeg-2 stream, so you
can simply capture video by doing:

cat /dev/video0 > myvideo.mpg
[cntrl-c to stop]

And then just 'vlc myvideo.mpg' to play.  (Humm, makes it easy to set up
chron jobs for program recording...but my TiVo already does a good job of
that ;')

I hope this might be helpful to someone.


Phil

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